A Long Day's Journey

Made it home earlier this morning at around 0100 local time, at the conclusion of a 30 hour travel day from Germany. The good news is that we made the flight at 0400 from Ramstein to McChord, but the bad news was that there was an intermediate stop along the way at McGuire AFB in New Jersey...about 45 miles from Philadelphia. Was trying to avoid east coast stops and the chance of getting stuck due to the flight backlog there from the hurricane, and sure enough once we arrived at McGuire we found that our hoped-for quick turnaround was instead going to be a 16 hour layover...leading to another 0400 roll call.

Faced with the prospect of a long delay, and with no hope of grabbing any lodging on base, we said the heck with it and booked a cheap commercial flight from Philly back to Portland. Fact is, we were home snug in our bed by the time they even called the roll for the McChord flight in New Jersey, so it worked out great for us.

Today is a recovery day, then tomorrow we'll drive up to McChord to reclaim our car which is still in the long-term lot there. We're pretty tired after two nights of little or no sleep, but glad to be back home...where it's actually warmer than either Ramstein or McGuire, BTW.